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“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.” (Carl Rogers)

Monday, 29 June 2015

This chapter is unapologetically
“cast in the framework of therapy” and attempts to answer the question: “What
sort of human being do we wish to grow?” This is because “the best of education would produce a person
very similar to the one produced by the best
of therapy.” Therefore, Rogers wishes to formulate a theoretical concept of the
optimal end-point of therapy, or education, which is open to
operationalization.

1.The background from which the problem is approached

Rogers is very
clear that his perspective is of a completely successful experience of
person-centred therapy, an intensely personal and subjective person to person
relationship between client and therapist. This means that the therapist feels
this client to be a person of unconditional self-worth, is able fully to
empathise with the client and the therapist is comfortable in entering this
relationship fully. The client is comfortable in the knowledge of being
accepted unconditionally and feels able to experience his feelings fully and
completely.

2.The characteristics of the person after therapy

These are the
personality characteristics that would develop in the client as a result of the
experience of successful person-centred therapy. The description is unitary,
but Rogers breaks it down into three facets for clarity of presentation.

2.1 This person would be open
to his experience

This is the
polar opposite of defensiveness.
There would be no barriers, no inhibitions to fully living the experiences of
the organism, no shutting them out of awareness.

2.2 This person would live in
an existential fashion

Living without
defensiveness, each moment would be new. The hypothetical person would realize
that ‘what I will be in the next moment, and what I will do, grows out of that
moment, and cannot be predicted in advance by me or by others.’ Self and
personality would emerge from
experience rather than experience being translated or twisted to fit a
preconceived self-structure. “Such living in the moment, then, means an absence
of rigidity, of tight organization, of the imposition of structure on
experience. I means instead a maximum of adaptability, a discovery of structure
in experience, a flowing, changing
organization of self and personality.

2.3 This person would find his
organism a trustworthy means of arriving at the most satisfying behavior in
each existential situation

“He would do
what ‘felt right’ in this immediate moment and he would find this in general to
be a competent and trustworthy guide to his behavior.”

3.The fully functioning person

Rogers pulls the
threads together into one more unified descriptive strand. Whether from an
optimal experience of therapy or education, the fully functioning person
emerges, and is able to live fully in and with each and all of his feelings and
reactions, sensing the existential situation within and without, unafraid of
his feelings. “He is a fully functioning organism, and because of the awareness
of himself which flows freely in and through his experiences, he is a fully
functioning person.

Some implications of this
description

Rogers presents
some of the significant clinical, scientific and philosophical implications of
his description of the fully functioning person.

A.Appropriate to clinical experience – “…the concepts I have stated
appear to be sufficiently broad to contain the positive outcomes of therapy as
we know it.”

B.Leads toward operational hypotheses – these are not easily tested
concepts, however, measurability is possible.

C.Explains a paradox of personal growth – the paradox is that the
personal undergoing marked personal growth has a ‘looseness’, an openness,
which some diagnostically-oriented psychologists might see as the person
‘falling apart’ – however, Rogers sees this uncertainty, even turmoil, within
the self as part of the pleasure and satisfaction of being more fully onself.

D.Creativity as an outcome – this fully functioning person could well
be one of Maslow’s ‘self-actualizing people’; creative products and creative
living would emerge from somebody so open and trusting.

E.Builds on trustworthiness of human nature – “…the basic nature of
the human being, when functioning freely, is constructive and trustworthy.”

F.Behavior dependable but not predictable – although behaviour in any situation
will be dependable and sound, it is not possible to predict in advance how the
fully functioning person will behave - with an authority figure, for example.

G.Relates freedom and determinism – Rogers contrasts the fully
functioning person, who is free (to become himself or hide behind a mask, and
so on) and the defensively organized person, who is not free, but determined by
the factors in the existential situation (including his defensiveness, which
denies or distorts his organismic data) – in this way Rogers can both enter
subjectively the free experience of his client, as well as, as a scientist,
study his behaviour as absolutely determined.

4.Conclusion

Rogers describes
the fully functioning person again, and then says that he does not exist. He is
the theoretical goal, the end-point of personal growth – persons move in this
direction in the right circumstances, causing Rogers to ask educators to think
more deeply about their own goals, the chapter itself being a challenge to
educators, should they disagree with Rogers’ description of the fully
functioning person, to give their definition as part of a dialogue about
education.